Hugh Grant's laughter medicine

Hugh Grant played practical jokes on his mother while she was dying of cancer - in a bid to keep her spirits up.

In a new book aimed at helping friends and families of cancer sufferers, entitled 'What Can I Do To Help?', the 'Notting Hill' actor reveals for the first time how he coped with mum Fynvola's illness and death.

Recalling his hospital visits in his mother's last days, Hugh writes about how he made his beloved mum laugh by wearing her bedpan as a hat and blowing up surgical gloves to resemble udders.

He says: "I got a bit bored and went back to tormenting her - my personal favourite being secretly activating her hospital bed so that the head and legs both lifted to put her in an amusing jack-knife position.

"The inflated surgical-glove-cum-udder, the cardboard potty as millinery and gulping the patients' oxygen to alleviate hangovers also passed the hours."

Hugh also jokes that a disastrous attempt to blow-dry his mother's hair may have "finished her off" - because she tragically died the next day.

He said: "I even blow-dried her hair on the day before she died, which was frankly not the success I had hoped for, and which may - I now concede - have finished her off."

Hugh was so distraught when Fynvola died that he temporarily put his successful movie career on hold to allow him time to grieve.